The Early Riser and the Night Owl: How to Make it Work
It can be easy to reach the point in your marriage where you are like passing ships in the night. That point where you go about your daily business and your relationship becomes almost a side note. Little conversation other than “arrangements” and schedules happens, and you just keep it moving. The Early Riser-Night Owl conflict
This becomes even more challenging when one of you is an early riser and the other a night owl. Which just happens to be a great setting for clashing. I prefer to rise early, and she’d much rather stay in her bed for an extra hour or so. While we both are at home throughout the day (I work from home and she homeschools plus directs our kids homeschooling community), that part about our peak energy and focus time definitely doesn’t mesh. I’m usually a big sloth beginning around 9pm. But if I come trying to share my ideas and have deep conversation in the morning when she first wakes up she doesn’t want to hear it, and only about half of it probably even registers with her. Knowing this scenario won’t help our relationship long-term, and that we are just missing out on each other, we’ve tried to find ways to make it work better. If you are in the same boat, here are some suggestions to help you. While one of you doesn’t have to switch up and morph into an early riser or night owl, you may have to sacrifice something. We’ve found the best possible way for us to get some quality time when we both are coherent is by putting the kids to bed early, consistently. But putting them to bed early, like starting bedtime at 7:30 and being done by 8:30, I haven’t yet crashed mentally, and have at least 30 minutes. While getting our kids down early is a challenge, that 30-minutes before my mental crash time can be the spark to keep me up and focused for another 30-minutes or more. My wife doesn’t enjoy the morning, but having something productive to do encouraged her to rise early. Since we were active it also got her blood flowing and “work her up” so she was focused. Not much talking happens during the workout, but afterwards we good conversation can be enjoyed. Some friends of ours have a great method for this. The husband is the early riser, and the wife is not. Are you an early riser married to a night owl, or vice versa? How do you make it work? Read more from Jackie on his blog, JackieBledsoe.com, or receive his Babble posts in your inbox plus all his relationship posts from around the web by subscribing to his weekly newsletter!
